In my usual complaint about second books in series, I remembered absolutely nothing whatsoever from the first book and, by halfway through this could, could just about tell you who I think was in the first one. 
The second half of this book was weird and interesting in its own right but the first part was hard to get through, mostly because the author and I have wildly different ideas of what someone is coming to the book with. And also because it so clearly felt like a setup. But the second half was so wildly interesting so an average of three.

Okorafor's adult books nearly always end up with me lowkey screaming at the emotional devastation. Apparently she only pulls her punches in YA.
I did like this story a lot, though, in how it talks about life and death and myth and kindness and greed. 

If Sherry Thomas insists on keeping to the perfectly reasonable pace of one Lady Sherlock novel a year, I guess I’m just going to have to read her other books in my ongoing attempt to read only nonfiction and coping mechanisms but nothing in between.
Look at me, two m/f romances in the same week. What is even happening here?
This book absolutely runs on romance novel, from the series of extraordinary coincidences (although, to be fair, you really can run into literally anyone in Manhattan) to the relationship between love and obsession to the speed at which minds are changed. And also the research was very fun, I had a hard time not rooting for the characters and everyone liked dinosaurs. Well, everyone worth liking anyway. This book is teetering on the edge of my “possessive hero is obnoxious not sexy” but comes down on the right side in the end (Thomas knows her craft) so we are on to the next book.
(First book - enemies to lovers. Second book - here the whole time. This feels like a pattern I have seen in other trilogies.)

So we’re just…doing valets for a bit I see. Insert that Calvin and Hobbes “I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul” quote here.
This is very different in tone than Alexander’s book; the stakes are different and also the sense of what is possible and worth losing is very different. It makes the book feel much more somber and as if it’s aiming for realism rather than verisimilitude (I swear they mean different things at least in my head).
More historical but no less romance.

This is not a book written to surprise you. That would not be a good romance novel, after all. This is a book that tells you exactly where it’s going and drags everyone along for the ride. I had forgotten how many improbable things need to happen to make a romance novel work, although I do wonder if Zac Pinsent has given the world an unreasonable idea of how easy it is for a gentleman to dress himself. As with all enjoyable regency romances, this one takes the emotions seriously and the rest of it just enough for verisimilitude. As it should be. 

I somehow missed this was fantasy when I took it out, which just goes to show that I pay nowhere near enough attention to actually remember things.
It was very cute; I see exactly what the blurbs mean and this was an enjoyable enemies to lovers, although I would have preferred a little more space for the world building and would cheerfully have traded some of the “do people really call each other mean nicknames to their faces”ness for that.

It’s interesting - I don’t relate to the world similar to Curtice, especially thinking about God and worship and…stuff, for lack of a better term. But I do find the way that Curtice thinks about it to be useful in articulating how we share certain end values but get there in totally different ways. The ways in which she is thoughtful helps me think because it asks me how I, nestled in my own religious world, end up in a similar place by wildly different paths. And when I want to and when I don’t.
But I am, for obvious reasons, deeply invested in a theology of resistance and the role that it needs to play in standing up to evil since it is so often used instead to justify it.

Oh Celehar. I’m so glad I reread the entire Chronicles of Osreth before this book came out because WOW did she pull on and wrap up a ton of loose ends. 
This series is rapidly approaching my “if I loved it less I could talk about it more” stage, but I will also add that Celehar as prelate and religious figure is so interesting to me professionally and really just one of my touchstones in thinking about faith in fantasy literature. 
But also UGH this book! I want to start it again from the beginning. 
(My main issue is that the audiobook reader made completely different choices about how to do csevet’s voice and it was throwing me off.)

I’m so glad the world of the goblin emperor now has a name (Chronicles of Osreth) so I can talk about it. 
Every story in this world just makes me want to spend more time in it. I think I’m just a sucker for gaslamp fantasy. 

I’m still not sure if this is the best or worst thing to be reading right now. The question that haunts the book comes about halfway through and asked to our protagonist outsider: what do you do when there isn’t enough for everyone?
And this book lays bare all the ways in which the answer “well then we don’t have to share” is incredibly broken.